Preschool Literacy Activities
“Schools teach curriculum; preschools teach children.” Teaching 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds is like teaching college freshmen with college graduate students. So you need a “curriculum” that is more like a medical bag. Tools for diagnosis and medicine for treatment all rolled into one convenient program. Rocket Phonics is a series of games that are fun, diagnostic and adaptable to the needs of your children’s developing brains.
There are several steps to learning to read. The first step is hearing the individual sounds within the words known as phonemic awareness. Infants spend the first year of life listening for the beginning and end of words so they can speak one at 1 year-old. At this point they hear words as one sound. Gradually, they learn to rhyme which usually has two ending sounds that are the same (phonological awareness) and a single sound – phoneme – that changes. Eventually, about 80% will hear all the sounds within the word which is phonemic awareness.
Can Preschoolers Learn To Read
For this reason, Rocket Phonics designed games that train reading readiness. The child can play, develop social skills and have fun. And the games meet the VPK emergent reader standards.
For example, Standard 1 Benchmark (a) is “Engages in multiple back-and-forth communicative interactions with adults.” Every game meets this standard. Similarly, Standard 3 “Shows alphabetic and print knowledge” we use the Word Find Game which is like an Easter egg hunt with words to meet this standard. So the kids get to be kids. And the preschool gets to be a preschool.
In order to test this ideal, Rocket Phonics games were tried in a preschool twice a week for two months. The results showed a third of the four-year-olds were reading words. This is well above state requirements! And the rest were well on their way and their parents were very happy.
It’s important to realize, VPK is evaluated only for academic aspect of school readiness. Therefore, the assessment has 4 areas: Print Knowledge, Phonological Awareness, Oral Language Vocabulary and Mathematics (number sense). Rocket Phonics easily covers the first three without turning preschool into a school. Preschools are freed to do what they were originally designed for in the first place. Preschools help children to interact with many children their age.
In summary, yes with the right preschool literacy activities and the right attitude many preschoolers can learn to read.
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